Shut Down For Pirating Your Own Content?

from the clueless-ISPs dept

Everyone knows that plenty of content that is transferred using BitTorrent is perfectly legit, right? Apparently not the bright folks at 1and1 Internet, one of the world's most popular hosting firms. According to Boing Boing they sent a cease and desist letter to a website owner, claiming he was guilty of copyright infringement for hosting torrents of his own films. Once again, it looks like a clueless company is associating the protocol BitTorrent, with the activity of distributing unauthorized material. I wonder where they got that idea? Update: The company is now claiming the policy is in place partly for legal reasons, but also because BitTorrent uses up too much bandwidth, suggesting they have no clue how BitTorrent actually works, as that's exactly what BitTorrent is designed to avoid.